Password protecting a directory and all of it's subfolders using .htaccess

Question

I am trying to password protect a subdomain and all of it's subdirectories and files, but my knowledge on the matter is very limited, how can I go about doing that?

Answer 1

It's a simple two step process

In your .htaccess put

AuthType Basic AuthName "restricted area" AuthUserFile /path/to/the/directory/you/are/protecting/.htpasswd require valid-user 

use http://www.htaccesstools.com/htpasswd-generator/ or command line to generate password and put it in the .htpasswd

Note 1: If you are using cPanel you should configure in the security section "Password Protect Directories"

EDIT: If this didn't work then propably you need to do a AllowOverride All to the directory of the .htaccess (or atleast to previous ones) in http.conf followed by a apache restart

<Directory /path/to/the/directory/of/htaccess>       Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews       AllowOverride All </Directory> 

Answer 2

To password protect a directory served by Apache, you need a .htaccess file in the directory you want to protect and a .htpasswd file that can be anywhere on your system that the Apache user can access (but put it somewhere sensible and private). You most likely do not want to put .htpasswd in the same folder as .htaccess.

The .htaccess file may already exist. If not, create it. Then insert:

AuthType Basic AuthName "Your authorization required message." AuthUserFile /path/to/.htpasswd require valid-user 

Then create a .htpasswd file using whatever username and password you want. The password should be encrypted. If you are on a Linux server, you can use the htpasswd command which will encrypt the password for you. Here is how that command can be used for this:

htpasswd -b /path/to/password/file username password